Friday, February 03, 2017

Three Things

1. In the Los Angeles Times is an
interesting article
about aviation entrepreneurs working to bring back supersonic air
travel.

[Blake] Scholl [of Boom Technology] has staked
his claim on several advances, including a primary aircraft structure
built with carbon fiber composites -- like those in the Boeing 787
Dreamliner's frame -- which should be stronger and lighter than the
aluminum exterior of the Concorde.

...

"The
reason why [Concorde] prices were so high is fuel economy was poor,
and there was no economy of scale," Scholl said. "We have the
technology for that today."

Scholl said he chose a modified
commercial engine rather than a military-grade supersonic propulsion
system because of the high emissions standards and efficiency offered
by the conventional engines. And from a logistics standpoint, it would
be more difficult for military-grade technology to clear export
control, he said.

Advances in computing power and speed are
also key to developing more efficient supersonic jets. Engineers can
now test prototypes through computer models and make tweaks
immediately based on those results. Previously, they had to build a
plane, test it in a wind tunnel and then tweak the
design.

"We're now able to bottle physical features in a
computer that a short decade ago were unheard of," said Jim Ladesic,
associate dean of industry relations and outreach at Embry-Riddle
Aeronautical University's college of engineering in
Florida.

Notice that technological advances are making it
easy for them to "fail
faster" when working on whatever problems haven't already been
solved.

2. Believe it or not, the following three
items are not from the Onion:

For diners who have grown tired of servers who
introduce themselves and practically give you their life stories
before reciting the specials and adding details, the notion of getting
your food without a lot of chatter is welcome.

And the
article calls this all a "taste of a people-free future," as if that's
necessarily a bad thing, or even really true.

Weekend Reading

"[T]he
best way to protect [women's freedom over their own bodies] is to
protect everyone's medical freedom through free-market health reforms.
" -- Paul Hsieh, in "Health
Freedom for Everyone, Not Just Women"
at Forbes

A far better term is the one used by
nineteenth-century French economist Frederic Bastiat: "legal plunder."
Rand uses the term "political pull" to describe those who "succeed" by
convincing friends in government to use the law to plunder others or
to prevent them from competing.

Agreed. A title like that will draw almost anyone in, causing them to learn of a serious issue in an entertaining way. The synergy between education and entertainment you see there crops up quite a bit in the other work of the CPIP, which I think is part of why it is so effective.